Manufacturing Matters

Artificial intelligence has been around for many years, but the face of AI is continually changing. Today, by applying well-engineered AI to manufacturing toolsets, we can get closed-loop control and automation that has more humanlike characteristics than ever before. For this episode of Manufacturing Matters, TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin and Aaron Hand caught up with Kence Anderson, founder and CEO of Composabl, at Automate 20...

"Manufacturers and businesses of all types must always be ready to pivot, whether it means dealing with tariffs and geopolitical strife, labor shortage, supply chain issues, or other disruptions, everyone must be ready to pivot. Indeed, it’s a dance."

When tariffs were first announced, many businesses, including systems integration company Creative Automation, already had containers full of parts and equipment on...

Katana Cloud Inventory powers inventory and manufacturing workflows for 1500+ small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and routinely tracks over $300 million in monthly procurement data. That gives Katana a unique near-real-time window on the shifting interplay between unit costs, inventory and market demand in sectors like manufacturing. 

In this episode of “Manufacturing Matters,” TECH B2B Marketing’s Aaron Hand and Dan McCarthy i...

"We’re on a mission to build climate resilient homes for all…leveraging the latest robotics and automation technologies."
 
Construction costs have doubled in the last decade, and we have a shortage of skilled workers to build them anyway. In addition, climate events are getting more severe, so how can we start designing products that are climate-friendly, more resilient to changing weather patterns, and significa...

"We must teach kids that they can be a manufacturer too – not just a doctor, lawyer, or fireperson. You get to work with cutting-edge machines and with your hands, but we haven’t really been able to create this feeling yet."

There’s a lot of work to be done when it comes to reaching down further into school systems to help them understand, and to help teachers and faculty understand that manufacturing is a viable...

"When it comes to AI in the industrial world, it represents supply chain optimization with demand forecasting, predictive maintenance, machine vision for quality control, and much more. But it also represents the elimination of manual tasks."

Views on AI have changed drastically over the last five or so years, suggests Naresh Ram, Chief Science Officer at AAXIS. Today AI represents the elimination of manual and r...

“Whether its tariffs, COVID-19, the chip crisis, shipping issues, changes in EV direction, or beyond; every market disruption is a chance to adopt or adapt your strategies and methods of getting things done.”

In this special panel discussion episode of the Manufacturing Matters podcast, Jeff Stello (Metaphase Technologies), Jason Covar (The Imaging Source), Gerd Walter (Creative Automation), and Stu Shepherd (this year’s Engelberger...

The waveguides, modulators, microscopic lasers, photodetectors, and other optical components that form photonic integrated circuits (PICs) all need to be perfectly aligned to minimize signal loss on the chip. PICs simply cannot improve yields, lower costs, or efficiently scale without ever-faster alignment tools able to perform with nanometer precision. In this episode, TECH B2B’s Dan McCarthy chats with Physik Instrumente’s Scott ...

When systems integrators hit roadblocks where they must design something brand new that’s never been done before, that’s what we’re good at.

There are a lot of great systems integrators out there that build industrial automation systems that can do exactly what you need, bringing together industrial robots, controllers, vision systems, control cabinets, PLCs, and so on, explains Doug Harriman, Vice President of Engineering...

Systems integrators can become victims of their own success. In these cases, remote support becomes a much more viable and cost-efficient option.

Some systems integrators can become victims of their own success. When integrators deploy many systems and the crew that built the cells don't have the bandwidth to travel and see all these customers and can’t staff up massive service departments – it can become an issue. Co...

By some measures, the production of optics and photonics core components is $400 billion a year market now, and the technology’s downstream value far exceeds that figure — particularly when calculating in new developments like photonic integrated circuits (PICs). But will photonics ever challenge the value of electronics? Or is it more of an analog to electronics’ early days? Or is photonics simply one of the electronics industry’s...

If you're selling a limited number of products over the course of Q1-Q3, and then suddenly you have this incredible spike in demand with peak season, that variability doesn't lend itself to sort of traditional forms of automation.

The world is changing, day to day, week to week, and what you are selling today may not be what you are selling tomorrow. In addition, consumer e-commerce demands can shift drastically ...

Whether it’s in retail, robotics, or quality inspection, our customers today are finding ways to leverage AI to merge multiple different components at once instead of having a single line for one component.

While the attention of the masses may gravitate toward robots and AI, machine vision remains an indispensable and increasingly vital technology for businesses of all types around the world. In this episode of Manufactur...

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) technology is sparking transformations in applications as diverse as LiDAR systems, agri-food, and hyperscale data centers. But manufacturing PICs at scale demands a level of complexity beyond the scope of any single company. It will take an ecosystem. That is the principle behind PhotonDelta’s alliance of materials foundries, PIC designers, chip packaging firms, and other technology partners wor...

Whether you’re programming robots, working in a clean room environment or a dirty steel mill, people working in manufacturing jobs can make a fantastic living and should be proud.

Industrial cables are the silent technology that keeps the PLC connected to the HMI and the robot connected to the controller. In some ways, the only time that people think of cables is when there is a problem with one, according to Jay Swank, Business Dev...

Customers always said to us, we can't find individuals to work on second shift or third shift. We need automation. So, the game changed for us as a company

In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, Nino LaDuca, CEO, Shape Technologies and Simon Kenworthy, Global President, Shape Process Automation joined TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin to talk about the global economy and the state of manufacturing across different verticals. ...

Sometimes the gap separating conventional optics from advanced high-precision performance is only an angstrom thick.

Even cutting-edge optics don’t always cut it for the most demanding applications in imaging, laser systems, LiDAR, and augmented/virtual reality gear. Accucoat’s Patrick Iulianello joins TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin and Dan McCarthy in this episode to discuss how advanced optical coatings can minimize reflect...

Manufacturers rapidly address new challenges with AI-enabled vision sensors and simplified calibration for robotic applications. 

In this episode of Manufacturing Matters, SensoPart’s head of applications engineering, Alex Rudolph, joins TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin and John Lewis to discuss the latest in machine vision technology. ​They discuss SensoPart’s unique offerings in the industrial automation sector, particul...

In this special robotics panel discussion episode of the Manufacturing Matters podcast, Juan Aparicio (Reshape Automation), Josh Cloer (Mujin), SK Gupta (GrayMatter Robotics), and Suzy Teele (ARM Institute) join TECH B2B Marketing’s Winn Hardin and Jimmy Carroll to discuss all things current and trending in robotics and industrial automation. Topics include ongoing labor shortage woes, AI applicability in robotics, a rise in applic...